Bruce Little
President
iSplice Films, Winnipeg
Mathieu Morin
Head of Mixing
Lamajeure, Montreal
Gordon Sproule
Audio Engineer
DBC Sound, Vancouver
up workflows that will be efficient to the space we have and to the
project’s needs so we really can accommodate changes and avoid
getting pinched on shrinking timelines. The tools are available to do
it; it’s more a budgetary restriction that keeps people from re-open-
ing projects after the last dollar was already spent.
PS: Outside of the crunch on timelines and its related effects,
what would you say is the most significant challenge facing
your studio and/or the audio post community as a whole at
this point in time?
Leclerc: Luckily, computers are getting faster, so everyone has that
going for them. Also, everyone involved in the post-production in-
dustry realizes that you must improve your repertoire when it comes
to what you can do. So-called “‘audio editors” in the future should
also be audio mixers and, eventually, video editors. Technology is
not only making us quicker at doing the tasks that we need to do;
it’s also making us more adept at becoming multifunctional.
Mixing a film is analyzing a film. What can you do to emphasize
a point of view of the film in the mix suite? Well, once you learn
that, you can easily reverse-engineer the idea and apply it to picture
editing. Content creators must realize that cultivating talent in the
industry means letting their employees grow multi-disciplinarily.
A great filmmaker is a great filmmaker not because they make
great films, but because they understand how great films are made.
It’s a process with a million busy bees, and if you can imagine what
it’s like being every little busy bee, you can imagine what it’s like
making a film from a very ground-up perspective.
Pretty soon, colouring and editing a film will become syn-
onymous with sound designing and mixing a film. Technology is
streamlining the post process. “Point-finale.”
Little: This is still a trend. Sometimes I get requests to complete the
entire sound post on a feature or MOW in two to three weeks. Be-
cause I only have a small team, I will sub-contract these projects out
to a studio in a bigger city and switch my role from sound editor/
mixer to post supervisor. In the near future, I will look to train a few
more sound editors so we can keep these jobs in town.
Morin: Shrinking timelines are what enables high-end studios to
still be relevant nowadays. Having the chance to work in an efficient
environment with powerful tools and experienced project manag-
ers, producers, and artists is what makes us the partner of choice
when it comes to handling productions in the advertising business.
Sproule: I think it will always be the case. It’s a very hard industry to
predict and estimate how smoothly each step will go, and of course
sound and VFX are at the end of the process, so we end up with
most of the crunch time. We spend a fair amount of time setting
40 PROFESSIONAL SOUND
Batiot: I think maybe shrinking budgets? Of course it depends on
your market, but I get the sense that a lot of clients aren’t allocating
enough to audio, so then you get into a situation where you’re hav-
ing to eat some costs in order to make the project happen. That’s
fine for a certain percentage of projects, but I think you need to find
that balance.
Foster: With the increase in the number of channels and OTT ser-
vices, there is a higher demand for content. This is great for job secu-
rity, but the challenge is to maintain the quality. We as a community
need to ensure there are enough qualified people to handle the
influx of work. Mentorship and education are important. We have
had positive results with our internship program at Deluxe.
Leclerc: Bandwidth. Give me more bandwidth!
Little: Producers not having a workflow in place from the begin-
ning of production to delivery of the final master or masters is the
biggest challenge. If the post supervisor can get involved in the pro-
cess from the very beginning of pre-production to make sure post
is considered along the way, that just makes everything so much
easier and ultimately cheaper.
Morin: For the past three years or so, we’ve been dealing with a
growing trend of advertising agencies building post-production fa-
cilities in-house. We thought sound would be spared because of the
infrastructure it requires to be able to deliver a quality product, but
we’re seeing new studios being built in large agencies. That makes
it more and more important to showcase the quality of our craft.
Selling our artists, their experience, and their talent has become the
key to future success.
Sproule: There will always be fine balance between advance-
ments in technology and a reliable work station. We always strive
to stay ahead of the curve to provide both of these in our work
environment. With the speed at which gear goes out of support or
becomes dead technology, I think it’s an ongoing battle to find ways
to cross over to new technology without revamping your entire
equipment list every five years.